John Maynard Keynes Quotes

7 quotes from John Maynard Keynes on investing and entrepreneurship.

On investing

• The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

• If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

• By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

• Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

• Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.

• Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

On entrepreneurship

• The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.